Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival: Cinemawala

European Premiere

This new tale by Kaushik Ganguly, one of West Bengal’s most accomplished directors, depicts a love-torn nostalgia for the passing age of film. Pranabendu Das is a semi-retired cinema owner from a small town in West Bengal. He owns a movie theatre ‘Kamalini’ named after his former wife. He and his ageing projectionist lovingly tend their film stock and wonderfully ancient movie projector, but the audience doesn’t come any more and the cinema is falling into disrepair.

Meanwhile for Pranabendu’s opportunist son Prakash, who has no idealist aspirations, business comes first, he stashes pirated DVDs of new films in the family home and sells them in town. As Pranabendu faces the heart-breaking closure of his beloved cinema and the police come to call about Prakash’s bootleg activities, father and son both purveyors of cinema in their own ways, come to loggerheads.

Cinemawala, dir. Kaushik Ganguly, India 2016, 105 mins. Bengali with English subtitles.